Decided to test-drive my Crawl! Articles on character features (build, height, weight, hair and eye colour, distinguishing features) and expanded Occupations (including tables tied to Abilities, so if, f’rinstance, your highest score is Strength 14, you’d roll on the Strength-based Occupations table). Here’s the first entirely random character created using the DCC core rules and the Crawl! articles:

Vos is a wiry, surprisingly strong raider with a lust for wine, women, and wealth and an unfortunate disdain for anything approaching civilized manners. Gray-eyed and marred by a ruined right ear, he wears tatty wool trews and a dirty fur vest and carries a heavily-scarred handaxe and wooden shield, as well as a patchy old sack tucked into his belt.

It was pretty funny to end up rolling a stereotype, so would anyone like to roll another test-drive character with me? Roll the abilities up, 3d6 in order, and we'll go from there.

Roll a percentile for your Occupation (we'll obviously be consulting the Stamina-based Occupations table). Roll a percentile for Hair Colour, a percentile for Eye Colour, and a d20 for a Distinguishing Feature (it'll be from the Negative Characteristics Table).Roll 2d6-2 for Build.

It's a trio of different articles ("Not Just A Pretty Face", "More Than Just A Pretty Face", and "From Dung to Dungeon" though the former two will probably be merged). Won't be the next issue, but two other articles I've done will be in #2. I can't tell you what the two articles are about yet as Dak hasn't revealed the contents of issue 2 generally.

I've done 11 articles for Crawl! so far, so there's a LOT more coming.

In my fantasy world most people are born into a trade regardless of natural skill. Your father made boots,your grandfather made boots and you will damn well make boots!! Doesn't matter that you are a great cook,make BOOTS!!

Different strokes and all that, but the basic concept isn't that characters have necessarily chosen an Occupation, but rather that Occupations strongly favour and force the development of certain key Abilities.

You may be naturally frail, but after relentlessly working on your father's farm like every one of your ancestors, your Stamina is incredibly unlikely to remain abysmally low. Doing your ancestral job when you're not naturally suited means you'll either die, be booted in disgust (you're no son of mine, you pathetic weakling!) leave (at which point you pursue an Occupation you're better able to deal with; which is what your Occupation roll would represent in such a case), or the job will mold you to suit it whether you want it to or not.

Just because your character's 3d6 roll for Stamina was 14, doesn't imply you chose to be a farmer; it simply implies that you have a high Stamina because either you were naturally tough or became tougher and fitter due to the hard work of farming. Similarly, having a high Intelligence, and rolling Scribe as an Occupation doesn't mean you automatically were a scribe like your father (though it's the most likely reason); you might have been part of a farming family, but you found farmwork untenable or had some other issue that resulted in you basically failing or fleeing from farming and becoming a scribe instead.

Besides, I can absolutely guarantee that even if you don't agree with what I've said above, you'll still enjoy the article. Why? Because it's written to please both folks who want Occupation to reflect Abilities *and* folks who just want a larger, expanded selection of completely random Occupations. Don't want to roll for Occupation based on high Ability? Roll 1d10 first: 1-2: Roll on Strength, 3-4: Roll on Agility, etc. It's actually there, already included as a note and option in the article. So, you really can use it either way.

I like the idea of stat based occupation tables; totally random is often funny, but it is easier to get your head around a character who has drifted into a walk of life he or she can actually do. That said, this system would probably not have given us a character like Samwell from Game of Thrones...

I like the idea of stat based occupation tables; totally random is often funny, but it is easier to get your head around a character who has drifted into a walk of life he or she can actually do. That said, this system would probably not have given us a character like Samwell from Game of Thrones...

Even if you decide to stick with just rolling Occupation based on the highest ability, you can still end up with a character who's godawful at their job, but in that case it'd be because they were such a woefully inept individual they suck as everything. Like I said though, the article is specifically written to permit both Ability-based Occupation generation *and* totally random Occupation generation. The group simply chooses which approach they favour best.

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